Power Play (16 page)

“I slept on campus. Decided not to drive all the way back to Lignite in the snow.”

“You live in Lignite?”

“All my life,” said Rogers.

Jake hadn’t realized that. “Are you busy? Got time for a chat?”

Rogers answered, “I’m talking things over with a few of my grad students. You want to come up here? Might be interesting for you.”

“Sure,” Jake said.

“Better walk,” said Rogers. “Our parking area hasn’t been plowed out yet.”

Nodding, Jake said, “Right. I’ll be there in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll have some hot coffee waiting for you.”

*   *   *

Most of the campus walkways hadn’t been cleared yet, either. Jake’s boots were soaked through by the time he struggled across the final snowdrift in front of the electrical engineering building’s main entrance. From off in the distance he could hear a snow shovel scraping on pavement. Maybe they’ll get all the walkways cleared off before the spring thaw, Jake thought sourly.

There were more of the
ALL CLASSES CANCELED
notices plastered on the corridor walls; Jake wondered who was on campus to put them up.

Rogers’s office was on the top floor and, sure enough, there was a big stainless steel coffeepot perking cheerfully atop the bookcase next to the physicist’s desk. A sleeping bag was half rolled up between the desk and the office’s only window, with a sturdy pair of thick-soled work boots beside it, next to the heating grill on the floor.

But no one was in the office. Jake heard voices coming from the glass-paneled door in the wall to his right. Stepping up to it he saw that somebody had Scotch-taped a sheet of paper marked
WORKSHOP—ENTER AT YOUR OWN PERIL
.

He recognized Rogers’s voice coming from the next room, so he rapped on the flimsy door once and opened it. Rogers and a half-dozen others were bent over a big circular oak table, which took up most of the room’s floor space.

“We’ve got to do better than this,” Rogers was saying, his back to Jake and the door.

Five of the grad students were young men. The sixth was Glynis Colwyn, who smiled as she recognized Jake. She looked freshly scrubbed and perky in a thick woolen turtleneck sweater and form-fitting jeans.

“Hi, Jake,” she said brightly. “Welcome to Rogers’s Rangers!”

“Rogers’s Rangers?” Jake asked.

Bob Rogers turned around with a self-deprecating little smile on his leathery face. “My grad students,” he explained, waving a hand at the five of them. “We’re a sort of think tank these days.”

His grad students showed up this morning, Jake groused to himself. Then he thought, Maybe they all slept here through last night’s snowstorm.

Jake looked questioningly at Glynis. Before he could ask, she said, “No, I haven’t taken up EE. I’m doing liaison for Professor Sinclair.”

“Oh,” said Jake.

“Take your boots off and put them over by the heating grill,” Rogers said. “Dry them out.” Jake noticed that the physicist was in his stocking feet: brightly patterned argyles.

As Rogers introduced his grad students, Jake saw nine tubular objects laid out on the round table. They looked about the same size as a night watchman’s flashlight, but they were blackened on one end; two of them seemed to have been melted almost halfway down their lengths.

Rogers gestured toward them. “That’s our problem,” he said. “This might stop the whole program in its tracks.”

LIGHTNING RODS

“What do you mean?” Jake asked, peering at the objects on the table.

“Electrodes,” Rogers said, almost dolefully.

One of the grad students raised his head and sniffed loudly. “I think the coffee’s done,” he said. Jake had already forgotten his name.

“I’ll get it,” said Glynis. With a wry grin, she added, “Woman’s work, you know.” A couple of the male students hooted derisively.

As she slipped out of the room, Rogers explained that the electrodes were fitted into the channel of the MHD generator.

“The plasma goes through the channel at supersonic speed. It’s more than five thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It’s loaded with potassium salts to buck up its conductivity and a lot of sulfur compounds from the coal.”

With a nod of understanding, Jake said, “So the channel takes a beating.”

Rogers shook his head. “The problem’s not with the channel. It’s lined with ceramic tiles, like the heat shield material on the space shuttle. The channel’s okay. It’s the damned electrodes.”

Jake looked down at the blackened tubes.

“The electrodes have to be electrical conductors. We can’t make them out of ceramic. They have to tap the electrical power in the plasma and carry it out to the transformer.”

“I get it,” said Jake. “If they don’t work well you can’t get the power out of the plasma.”

Rogers nodded glumly as he hefted one of the tubular objects in one hand. “They stick out into the plasma stream while it’s roaring down the channel, five thousand degrees hot and in supersonic flow, with megawatts per cubic inch of electrical power crackling in there.”

“Like lightning rods,” Jake muttered.

“Exactly!” said Rogers. “Lightning rods that’re getting zapped constantly, as long as the generator’s running.”

“They erode,” said one of the young men.

“A lot,” added the student beside him.

Jake picked up one of the electrodes. It was much lighter than he had expected, judging from its size. But he could see that one end of it had been melted as if it had been stuck into a blast furnace.

“And the erosion rate is too damned high,” Rogers said.

“How long do they last?” Jake asked.

“That one in your hand was in the little rig downstairs for just over a hundred hours.”

“They’re all from the little rig?”

“Yep. These are all from low-power runs. We haven’t even tried any long-duration runs on the big rig yet.”

One of the other students said, “We’re moving the separator from downstream of the channel to upstream, between the combustion chamber and the channel.”

The young man beside him said, “That’ll let us separate out the sulfur compounds before the plasma streams into the channel.”

“Which is where the electrodes are,” Jake said.

“Right.”

Rogers took up, “Separating out the sulfur upstream of the channel will help reduce the erosion rate. Lowers the plasma’s enthalpy a bit, but we can live with that.”

Before Jake could ask about enthalpy, Glynis pushed through the door with the big stainless steel coffeepot in one hand and a tower of Styrofoam cups swaying in the other.

“Coffee break,” she announced.

After a sip of the scalding-hot coffee, Jake asked Rogers, “How serious a hang-up is this electrode business?”

“Pretty damned serious. When electrode performance degrades the generator’s power output nosedives. We haven’t been able to run for much more than a hundred hours without the damned buggers crapping out on us. And that’s at low power levels.”

Glynis, standing between them, said, “The professor is very worried about this.”

“He ought to be,” Rogers muttered.

“You’re melting the lightning rods,” Jake said, eying the blackened electrodes on the table.

A little more brightly, Rogers said, “I think if we could build them like mechanical pencils—you know, screw them into the plasma stream while they’re wearing down, like the lead in a pencil—we might be able to solve this problem.”

“Can you do that?”

“Tim’s working on it, up at the big rig. That, and moving the separator upstream of the channel.”

Glynis said, “He’s snowed in up there.”

“They’re okay, though?” Rogers asked. “Lignite hasn’t lost electrical power, has it?”

“They had an outage overnight,” she replied. “The power’s back on now. I talked with Tim over his cell phone first thing this morning.”

“Well,” Rogers said, holding his steaming Styrofoam cup in both hands, “we’re not going to solve this problem by staring at the little buggers.”

Raising his voice, he said to his grad students, “I want a survey of all the potential materials we can use for the electrodes, with their conductivities and their calculated erosion rates.”

The young men moaned a little. One of them asked, “How soon?”

“Yesterday,” said Rogers.

The young man shook his head. “I knew you’d say that.”

Rogers grinned at him. “Then why did you ask?”

He gestured toward the door, and Jake followed Glynis back into Rogers’s office. The physicist sat behind his desk; Jake and Glynis took the two plastic bucket seats in front of it.

“What’s Sinclair doing about all this?” Jake asked.

Rogers shook his head. “Not a damned thing. He seems paralyzed.”

Glynis agreed. “He’s been in something of a daze for the past several weeks. He canceled the one lecture he was supposed to give this semester. He spends most of his time cloistered in his office, all by himself.”

“He doesn’t see anybody?” Jake asked.

“Hardly anyone. His secretary, of course. And me.” She hesitated, her eyes flicking away from Jake for a moment. Then she went on, “But he hasn’t really had much to say to me lately.”

“Me, either,” Rogers said. “He used to want daily reports on how the runs are going. Last week he told me to e-mail a report to him every Friday.”

Looking uncomfortable, Glynis said, “It’s as if he’s … well, as if he’s in a stupor or something.”

“Something medical?”

“No,” Glynis said. “Psychological.”

Jake tried to sort this out in his mind. “And he doesn’t talk to anybody? Not even on the phone?”

“He’s spoken with Senator Leeds a few times.”

“Ah!”

“And his son. The professor talks to his son almost every day.”

“He’s letting Tim and me run the program,” Rogers said. “That’s not like him. Not like him at all.”

“What the hell could be wrong with him?” Jake wondered.

Glynis said, “Whatever it is, I think it’s got something to do with Leeds. The senator is just about the only person Professor Sinclair’s spoken to in the past month.”

Then she added, “And his son, of course.”

PRIMARY OPPOSITION

Two weeks later Jake attended the public debate between Tomlinson and his only Republican rival for the primary election, a local businessman named Harmon Dant. Amy had told him that Dant was a far-right conservative who neither knew nor cared about technology.

“He’ll talk about taxes, taxes, taxes,” Amy had said.

The debate was set for seven
P.M.
in the gymnasium of the city’s oldest high school. The basketball hoops at either end of the room had been folded up against their backboards and tiers of portable benches had been carried in. As usual, Jake was early; hardly a dozen people were there when he came in out of the frigid early March evening. As he climbed to the top tier of benches, where he could rest his back against the cinderblock wall, Jake pulled off his watch cap and lined coat. It felt chilly in the converted gym, but nowhere near as bad as the sub-zero winds gusting outside.

One local television crew was setting up a pair of cameras. Down in the middle of the floor stood two lecterns with a small desk between them.

Leaning against the wall, Jake realized that he hadn’t seen Amy in more than a week. They talked almost every day on the phone, but she was with Tomlinson almost all the time now. Jake wondered if she were sleeping with him, too.

As he watched the auditorium slowly fill up, Jake remembered Henry Kissinger’s remark that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac. He grinned ruefully. Well, that lets me out.

Then he saw Glynis Colwyn enter the auditorium, wrapped in a bulky hooded parka and muffler. She pulled the hood down, and her dark brown hair spilled down her back.

“Glyn!” he shouted, his voice echoing off the bare walls. “Up here!”

She looked up and saw him. So did just about everybody else in the place. Jake felt embarrassed yet glad as Glynis climbed up the benches toward him.

“It’s freezing out there,” she said by way of greeting as she sat next to him.

Jake had a sudden inspiration of wrapping his arm around her shoulders, but he figured he’d already called enough attention to himself, and besides she wouldn’t appreciate his gesture.

Instead, he helped her struggle out of the parka. She folded it neatly and slipped it beneath her rump. Jake did the same with his coat. It made a lumpy cushion but it was better than the hard bench.

“How’s Tim doing?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I haven’t seen him in a week. He’s ensconced himself up there in Lignite, working on the electrode problem. I think he sleeps with that stupid generator.”

And not with you, Jake added silently.

“Uh…” He tried to focus on the moment. “What brings you out here on a freezing night like this?”

“Professor Sinclair asked me to come to the debate and tell him how it went.”

“He’s feeling better?”

Glynis tilted her head slightly to one side. “He’s still pretty much a recluse. But he wants to know how Tomlinson does in this debate.”

“And you have no idea of what’s bugging him?” Jake probed.

“Tomlinson, of course. For some reason he’s terribly upset about Tomlinson making MHD such an issue.”

Jake looked into her dark, troubled eyes. This is my fault, he thought. But she doesn’t seem to blame me for it.

“Oh, look!” Glynis said. “Here they come.”

The auditorium was only half filled. Who wants to come out and freeze their butt on a night like this? Jake asked himself.

Tomlinson came striding out of a side door, all smiles, with a platinum-haired woman that Jake recognized as one of the anchors on the local PBS news station. Behind her came Harmon Dant, a bulky figure with thinning hair and a slightly uneasy expression on his apple-cheeked face. Tomlinson was wearing a perfectly tailored three-piece suit, as usual; Dant was in casual slacks and a navy blue blazer, unbuttoned and flapping around his ample middle.

The audience—such as it was—rose to its feet and applauded tepidly. Then Jake saw Amy Wexler hurry across the polished oak floor and take a seat on the front row of benches.

As the two candidates stood at the lecterns, the TV woman sat daintily at the little desk and looked directly into the camera with the red light glowing.